Job crafting in professional kitchens: body, gender and subjectivity in a constraining work context

Despite the burgeoning of job crafting literature in the last decade, not many studies examine job crafting in constraining work contexts. The main objective of this thesis is to study how professionals, as exemplified by restaurant chefs, enact job crafting in a constraining work context. Adopting a longitudinal ethnographic design, I have explored chefs’ job crafting practices in three professional kitchens based in London. Building on a relational ontology drawn from feminist Deleuzian scholarship, I frame job crafting as a relational process enacted in a professional’s day-to-day coping with various kinds of constraining job demands. Specifically, combining participant observations, ethnographic conversations, and semi-structured interviews, my thesis contributes to a relational view of job crafting that details the conditions under which professionals may respond differently and effectively to body-, gender- and subjectivity-related job demands. In doing so, I would argue that job crafting should not be confined to an individual domain, privileging discussions of the individual characteristics, personality, motivations, and values held by individuals and their intended job crafting activities. Instead, job crafting should be understood as a relational practice situated in a specific context that enables or disables different levels and forms of crafting, including those unexpected and emergent job crafting practices that redefine the meaning and values of work. The thesis consists of three theme focused articles of publishable quality and four complementary binding chapters.